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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23310586">Parallel Lives</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/northernexposure/pseuds/northernexposure'>northernexposure</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Spooks | MI-5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 14:29:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,296</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23310586</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/northernexposure/pseuds/northernexposure</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She cannot do the thing she urged him to do, all those years ago. She cannot let him go.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ruth Evershed/Harry Pearce</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Parallel Lives</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Years ago I wrote a lot of Spooks Ruth/Harry fanfiction. It is a very long time since I watched the show, but what with the lockdown and with the BBC putting the whole series on iPlayer - well, a rewatch was inevitable. I love Ruth and Harry as much as I did all those years ago. I have since deleted every one of my Spooks stories - they are all gone, both from the internet and from my hard drive. All but this one, which I thought I would repost. If you've never seen Spooks before, beware spoilers. If you already know the show, you will likely be able to work out exactly when this is set.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first time George had kissed her, it had taken her by surprise. They had eaten dinner at a taverna near the docks, finishing the last of their wine as the sun set. Afterwards, he had wanted to walk her home. George had done this each of the four times they had dined together, so that now he knew the way to her door as well as she did herself, though not what lay behind it. She hadn't been ready to invite him in and he hadn't asked, seeming to be aware that to do so would be counterproductive and apparently caring enough about whatever it was they were embarking upon not to jeopardise it so early. Ruth could not bring herself to consider the future. She was too consumed by a past she could neither confess nor explain to anyone she still knew.</p>
<p>On that particular night they had paused their slow stroll against the wrought iron railings of the dusty road that wound up the cliff to her apartment, looking out as the last vestiges of day radiated colour over the ocean from the horizon. Orange fading to pink fading to yellow, giving way finally to the first dark, hard edges of night. That vibrant light, so incandescent and yet so fleeting, stretched soft fingers towards the shore, and as Ruth looked down to where they led she had found herself trapped, as she so often did, in a whirlpool of memory. Of standing at another high point in a city far away, of looking down on a setting sun, of people oblivious to silent observation. Of a face that would not be hers to see again.</p>
<p>Somewhere amid the spinning torrent of her recollection George had reached out and brushed his fingers across her cheek, pushing Ruth's hair behind her ear. Another moment and his lips had touched hers - gently, warmly, briefly. He drew back but did not remove his fingers, looking down at her with a faint smile and dark eyes full of questions she would never fully answer.</p>
<p>"There are times when you look so sad," he said. "It makes <em>me </em>sad, to see it."</p>
<p>She had not known how to respond and so she had taken refuge, as she so often did, in quotation. "<em>Man passes misery to man</em>," she'd said softly, repeating Larkin, "<em>It deepens like a coastal shelf</em>."</p>
<p>George had raised an eyebrow, moving his thumb slowly over her cheekbone. "<em>'Get out as quickly as you can/and don't have any kids yourself'</em>?" he countered. "Ah, Ruth – you would not think such a thing if you met my son. Hard work, yes – but with it comes joy, too."</p>
<p>Ruth smiled. "I'm sure."</p>
<p>"What can I do?" he'd asked then. "To stop this sadness of yours?"</p>
<p>She didn't say anything, and so her silence became her answer. George had leaned forward again. This time the kiss had been longer, sweeter. It had teetered on the edge of something that may, in a parallel life, have been considered happiness.</p>
<p>It had been years, now. Years since that first kiss, since the joy George had promised her did exist had slowly wound its way into her heart to become hers as much as his. Years since the worst of those whirlpools had caught her in their riptide grip. Years since the past had been more potent than the possibility of a future that could be happy and serene.</p>
<p>Yet still, Ruth sometimes woke with faces from her past fading in her mind. Adam and Zaf, Jo and Malcolm… they permeated her dreams with scenes she frequently mistook for memories. Occasionally she wondered whether there was a conduit between them – whether, in some vaguely supernatural sense, she was dreaming what they were doing now. In her waking hours, Ruth generally tried not to take herself back there. It was too damaging, the imponderables that she would not be able to answer for herself. <em>How were they? Were they happy? Were they… safe? </em>As time went by, the last of those questions became the elephant in the corner of her mind she could not bear to acknowledge. In a life as dangerous as theirs, percentages and odds were the enemy, and her mind was all too aware of the statistics that hung over each of their heads. Ruth was one of the lucky few. She had walked away. In doing so she had lowered the odds that the rest of them would do the same. That nightmare life, from which she had woken and so many others would not.</p>
<p>There was one face she did not dream about. He did not come to her in sleep, perhaps because, of all of them, she could not help clinging to him while awake. As the years passed the frequency with which she brought Harry to her mind had lessened, but never ceased. Sometimes she found herself, as in fact she did now, lying with George's arm around her waist, their legs tangled together – the way he liked to hold her while they slept – with another man's face in her mind. It was foolish, she knew, to hold on to this last tiny aspect of her former self, but the faint guilt was outweighed by the obscure comfort she found in having Harry there, however ephemeral the experience. He was nothing but a figment, nothing but a ghost. He could do no harm to them, to their little family, to her heart. So she pulled him to her, silently, letting her gaze trace the creases on his face, wondering why, given the adored simple elegance of her life, given the man who held her so lovingly even in sleep, given the unexpected advent of the child she had once resigned herself to never having, she could not leave this last part of her past behind. She had everything. And yet… She could not do the thing she had urged him to do on that cold, damp jetty. She could not let him go.</p>
<p>This morning, as the early sun danced around the edges of the curtains, Ruth wondered if he ever thought of her. Was he at this very moment lying there in his bed in that parallel life, doing exactly as she was now? Did he ever wonder where she was, what had happened to her? Or had Harry himself become one of the statistics? Had he failed to beat the odds and…</p>
<p>She stopped herself, unable to bear the extremities of that thought. She returned her mind to a single frame of him, sitting in his office, speaking into his phone. It was the one place, she fancied, that Harry Pearce would forever return to, no matter what calamity had befallen them all. She liked to think of him there still, a constant, unchanging rock in the uncertain ebb and flow that typified every life, whatever stream they followed. Where was the harm? She would never see him again, after all. He could live forever, unchanged and unchanging, in the flashes of him she allowed herself to imagine. Fixed forever in that place behind his desk, the place that she knew him so well.</p>
<p>George's alarm beeped and he shifted slowly against her, pressing his warm lips against her neck.</p>
<p>"Time to get up," he mumbled, still half asleep. "I have to be early today."</p>
<p>"OK," she said, softly. "I'm going to stay here a little longer."</p>
<p>He turned her on her back, moved over her, kissed her – a lazy, arousing movement that brought her firmly back to the present. "Is there anything I need to bring back tonight?"</p>
<p>"Wine," she said. "I think we're out of wine."</p>
<p>"I'll try not to forget," he muttered, and then drowned her answer with his mouth.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[END]</p>
<p> </p>
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